Skype Becomes a Scourge

Here's a good measure of how close a new technology is to hitting the mainstream: the number of people complaining about how big a danger it's becoming.

The complaints usually turn out to be overblown. The Internet was supposed to turn us into a bunch of laptop potatoes addicted to sex, sports and gambling. It turned out that email, search and news were the big draws. We also hear how nanotech is supposed to kill us with toxic nanotubes and insidious yet tiny robots, just as music swapping will surely send Celine Dion and Clay Aiken to the poorhouse.

Now it's VoIP's (voice-over-Internet protocol) turn in the pillory, and the poster child for this latest menace is Skype. First released in August 2003, Skype is used by 55 million people around the world -- a user base larger than the populations of California and Texas combined. That brisk growth rate put Skype in the spotlight and made it a coveted target for eBay, which paid $2.5 billion for the company in September, vowing to pony up another $1.5 billion if certain goals were met by 2008.

Skype users can phone each other for free and phone others for a few cents a minute. You can imagine that's not going over very well with the phone carriers, which spend billions building up networks and paying fees and 911 costs only to watch customers defecting to VoIP services like Skype. And now that Google and Yahoo! are offering similar services, more Internet users are growing comfortable with them.

Unlike other services, Skype is a peer-to-peer (P2P) service, allowing users to send files to each other at no cost to themselves. Carriers have complained that sending large video and music files across P2P networks has sucked up bandwidth and slowed the Internet down for all their users. But Skype supporters argue that these concerns are overstated, and that the carriers are fighting to hang on to an antiquated business model.